Why is a nonsense tweet being posted as "news that matters" without even a minimal investigation into whether it's accurate or not?

msmash, you're a terrible editor. Roger Abbott, by not holding your editors to some kind of actual standards you're putting out a crappy product. Why did you buy Slashdot if this is what you're doing with it?

What the hell is this doing on Slashdot?

Because those are the articles msmash seems to approve. I have no idea why he thinks this belongs on Slashdot.

Look, not every article's going to be a winner, especially on a slow Sunday in June. But this is just nuts. What value is there in this article? Worse yet, the source article is behind a WSJ paywall.

It's not news. It helps nobody. C'mon Slashdot, do better, and pick editors who know the difference between news and not news.

There have been products that detect anything falling into the water for years; they're basically floating tilt-sensors that respond to waves and sound an alarm. No wristband needed.

I'm also seeing everything in bold, since sometime today.

And half of us are right.

You're describing what sounds like a waterfall approach. Successful software development shops dropped that nonsense twenty years ago.

In the United States, any device that offers a medical treatment or claims to have positive medical effects would already fall under FDA regulations via the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. They sort things into a bunch of different classes that determine the degree of risk and regulatory burden; anything that passes electricity into your head is probably going to need a full 510(k) registration.

Microsoft's heavy-handed attempts to force it on to my Windows 7 machine, combined with the clear message that Microsoft intends to make money by selling user data to the highest bidder, led me to decide to never, ever willingly install Windows 10 on any of my machines. Some of my employees are forced to use it by their clients, and my teenage son accidentally upgraded his laptop, so I have enough familiarity with the UI to be unimpressed.

My current Windows 7 machines are my final Windows platforms for anything other than client-specific work, and in those cases I'll use a VM. Once these machines have aged beyond usefulness then I'll either go Mac OS full time or a hybrid of Mac OS and a Linux distro.

Yes, I know Apple isn't exactly pure of heart or mind either, but I've never had a macOS upgrade force itself down my throat.

Listening to your community? Making changes based on their feedback? Amazing.

In all seriousness, good work. Behavior like that might actually turn Slashdot back into something awesome again.

The long-term question isn't whether people want a watch or something more generalized, it's more a question of whether your wrist is a viable place to wear something useful. Traditional watches and the plethora of UP/Fuel/FitBit bands seem to say "sure."

Any disruptive technology starts out less effective than the thing it's disrupting. Early cell phones were big, clunky, and had short battery life; early smart phones had clunky keyboards and low bandwidth; early SSD drives were (are) more expensive and smaller than HDDs, etc. Early smart watches have and will continue to suck at being watches, but that's not the point. When battery life is no longer an issue, when clunky tiny interfaces stop trying to replace bigger interfaces and focus on things that work well at that size, *then* the disruption will begin in earnest.

Various posters are correct that a Rolex is a fashion statement and that its time-telling ability is incidental. However, there is such a thing as fashionable technology, so for the luxury watchmakers to think that they're completely immune to disruption looks short-sighted to me.

When you're tired of screwing it up like amateurs, bring in Accenture so you can screw it up like professionals!

My firm has made a lot of money cleaning up Accenture's disasters. It's a living.

So while Accenture was originally based in Bermuda, they've since moved their corporate HQ to Ireland. Could we at least pick a vendor incorporated in the U.S.?

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use XML.' Now they have two problems."

-JWZ

MarkLogic is an XML database, not a relational database, so if your data primarily consists of XML content then it's the right tool for the job. Sounds like the vendor building the system had a favorite hammer and decided that a rather traditional database problem looked like a nail.

MarkLogic itself is fine if your data fits neatly into an XML schema, but with healthcare.gov that tree is probably enormous and hard to optimize for DB activity.